There's a roughly 5 year gap from ~1996-2002, tracking the rise of early GPUs and predating widespread Windows NT support and the release of DirectX 9, where it

There's a roughly 5 year gap from ~1996-2002, tracking the rise of early GPUs and predating widespread Windows NT support and the release of DirectX 9, where it can be difficult to run old games. Otherwise, Dosbox is great for really old games and you can directly run most games released in the last 20 years on modern hardware.